1. the two rivers: the Styx and the Spoon

From the beginning I was drawn equally to those two primary streams of early modern poetry, which I tend to think of as the Styx and the Spoon.  I cannot remember quite when or where I was when I encountered either of them for the first time.  The earliest memory of the Styx, river of death, dream and forgetfulness, was in some old book [...]

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. 7. From the Spoon to the Marne: poems of my grandfather’s war

Of the thirty-odd poems located along the Spoon River, perhaps a third center around the figure of my German grandfather, and of those a good many concern his experience in the First World War and the lingering effects of that experience once he had returned. The following poem, a narrative in blank verse, portrays my [...]

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. 7c. Ruins on the Somme: a lost war poet rediscovered

Of the many thousands of times that I have drawn a dusty nondescript book from a poorly-lit shelf in a used-bookstore during the past forty years, only once can I claim to have pulled down and opened an entirely unknown classic of American literature.  Not that I recognized it as such at the time.  Nor even now, on the eve of its re-publication by [...]

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. 9. By the banks of the Seine: paupers & Symbolists

My wife Marian was cheated of a life in Paris by Adolf Hitler. Her natural mother, a Jew, whom she never knew, was a performer in the Paris theatre before the war. By 1945, in a state of expectancy, she had fled to Montreal, in all probability to escape the Gestapo sweeps which would have [...]

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10. The body in the river: hard-boiled sonnets

A washed-up private eye with drinking problems and women problems.  My personal expertise kind of ends with the last two categories.  About the rest: police procedurals, investigative techniques, I’m still doing the research.  And I’m in need of a working plot.  No idea where this one is going.  But I’m at ease with the protagonist, Cramer, who speaks for [...]

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